Hardware lurkers - help me find a new video card!

[Concillian]

Thanks for your input. I confess to being one of those who automatically gravitates toward Nvidia cards. That 6850 looks pretty good. According to my search (my owner's manual is lost) my old Dell XPS 610i has a 750 watt power supply, so that should be adequate. I looked on Newegg and it appears to have two versions of that card available and the only difference between the 2 is that one supports something called "Eyefinity" and I wonder if this is something I ought to embrace or avoid.

Eyefinity is AMD-speek for their software features for dealing with multiple monitors. All of their cards support it, it's a driver thing. There are some cards with a special layout of ports or extra ports if they're specially made for using an array of monitors. Other than that, it's a complete non-concern for any typical user.

nVidia pricing IS competitive in the higher end cards ~$180ish and above, I try not to be biased, but I haven't really bought nVidia in quite a long time, pricing always ends up better on the AMD cards. I also overclock, so that changes the equation for price vs. performance. How much headroom there is becomes another factor. Anyway, I have no issue with others choosing nVidia... it's just a fact that the general public holds nVidia in higher regard than AMD and that nVidia prices themselves higher for a given performance in the lower end segments.

I guess I should also mention that something in the 5770 / 6770 range is quite adequate for 13xx resolution at very high settings or 1900x res with some stuff turned down. 6850 is a good mainstream 1900x card at pretty high options, may not max out, but will run well without AA. Will max out something like Diablo III, though, which is fairly easy on the graphics card.